December 09, 2004

How we work: Gustave Flaubert, author

Flaubert keeps things understated in letter to George Sand, December 1866:

I expressed myself badly when I said to you that "one should not write from the heart." I meant to say: not put one’s personality into the picture. I think that great art is scientific and impersonal. One should, by an effort of mind, put oneself into one’s characters and not create them after oneself. That is the method at least; a method which amounts to this: try to have a great deal of talent and even of genius if you can.

Comments

Speaking of authors and work, George Plimton's interview with Papa in the Paris Review (it's upstairs and I'm downstairs and can't remember the issue number or date) is a great study in how Hemingway put it down every day.

You should add George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright (and about a dozen other specialties) 1856-1950. Here are the gists of two pertinent quasi-quotes:

Shaw was once asked how he constructed his plays. He replied, "My plays are no more constructed than a carrot is constructed. My method is to hear the first part of a conversation in my head. Then I listen to someone else replying to the first statement. Soon this imaginary dialogue continues until I can flesh the conversationalists out with actual names and characteristics"...ëtc.

Once when asked what one of his plays meant Shaw replied, "How should I know? I'm only the author!" (See above.)

Thus Shaw considered himself somewhat of a medium receiving messages from somewhere when it came to creating his works, as opposed to someone who laid out a plot in advance. He called the latter procedure "Sardoodledom," satirically named after his contemporary playwright, the Frenchman Victorien Sardou, translations of whose plays were popular on the London stage at that time.

This is very interesting because we usually think that art's expressions are extensions of the author's hearts, when, actually, they aren't and they shouldn't be. An artist is a sort of channel and his mission is to communicate what those voices - the voices of art - are telling to him. Is all about attention and hard work rather than inspiration.